The Databox project will be have its first birthday this November. A lot has happened since last year, especially on the platform and analytics side. Please join us for the Year 1 roundup of the research, prototype, and demos of the Databox project. the event will be in the IET London and will include fun and interactive demos with personal data and IoT devices, in addition to research highlights, panel discussions, and debates around the next steps for the project over the next 2 years.

We will present the public release of a working open source Databox platform, which can be run on any device capable of running Docker containers. We endeavour to provide support for ARM devices such as the Raspberry Pi 3 for this release. This initial release has basic data collection support through mobile sensing libraries and selected APIs, provides basic data flow policing and privacy policy enforcement, and supports installation and operation of simple personal data processing apps. At this event we will briefly introduce and demo the Databox to you, then we hope to engage with security & privacy enthusiasts, data visualisation & analytics fans, and potential app developers to begin building a community and ecosystem around the Databox. We’re open to contributions of all kinds, from improvements to core components, to helping you integrate your favourite IoT devices, to brainstorming what apps and devices you want to see the Databox support!

Last week, our team showcased our Databox platform at BT Innovation week at Adastral Park, Ipswich, UK. There were nearly 5000 visitors over 5 days at the show.

Over the week, our team talked to a mix of businesses – a couple of banks, healthcare providers, a housing association, IoT developers, BBC, Sky, EPSRC and BT researchers. We presented three use-cases: fraud detection, personalised adverts and health insurance. Many attendees were able to see use-cases for their sectors – typical questions were “how much will it cost?”, “when will it be ready/commercialised?”, “how centralised local datastore model is more secure than distributed”, “what would be the physical form factor of the product if deployed?”, “Does it require dedicated hardware?”, “Can it run in BT’s home hub”, “how data usage would be analysed”.

In addition to this, many industry attendees mentioned concerns around GDPR (EU – General Data Protection Regulation) and could see how Databox can help industries/businesses to address the personal data storage related issues. Most of the discussions were about the overall concept and were around “how would I do this/that” and discussion on new potential applications. Overall, the project got positive feedback and follow-up invitations from the audience.

Databox 0.1.2 has been released. Lots of bugs have been squished, ARM7 and 64 support for Raspberry PI and other ARM devices has been improved and the developer experience has been enhanced using local docker images. This is the best Databox release yet!

The event served to introduce the motives behind Databox, the structure of the project and to gauge use cases within the community and potential application developers. The team presented the initial release of a working open source Databox platform, which includes basic data collection support through mobile sensing libraries and selected APIs, provides basic data flow policing and privacy policy enforcement, and supports installation and operation of simple personal data processing apps.

“Can we do detailed, user-centric, contextual analytics at a scalable rate without privacy disasters and legal challenges?”

The morning session began with a formal introduction by Hamed Haddadi into the research project itself, explaining the high-level goals of the project: “Can we do detailed, user-centric, contextual analytics at a scalable rate without privacy disasters and legal challenges?” Richard Mortier followed with a summary of the technical architecture of the Databox and described the driving motive as an open-source, personal networked system, NOT another data silo that acts as a honey pot – the focus being to move computation to where the data is, thus reducing the movement of data itself. Tosh Brown and Yousef Amar then followed with (working!) demonstrations of the Databox SDK and UI, and development of drivers and applications at the container level.

The afternoon session was driven by the attendees, who were all asked to propose applications for and uses of the Databox, with small focus groups facilitating this development.

See my raw notes from the event below.

Thank you to all those who attended, the Databox Project team, and to the staff at Darwin College.

Contribute to the open-source software Databox project

You can contribute to the open-source Databox prototype by visiting the repository and checking out the:

Motivations

The Databox seeks to collate, curate and mediate third-party access to your personal data, whilst creating a user-friendly environment to effectively manage your data. We are generating data more than ever in the form of wearables, social media etc, and our digital footprint can be used by third parties to infer a wealth of information about us. Currently the user has little choice about which data is shared and with whom it is shared – we need a privacy-aware data analytics platform.

Technical Architecture and Design Principles

Performing local data processing and moving data as little as possible has benefits including:

apps process the data, where the computation is. Apps installed as containers with explicit permissions upon installation and provided by the arbiter to allow them to access specific data.

UI and SDK

The SDK provides a user-friendly cloud environment for building Databox applications quickly, and finding approved applications to use on your own Databox – you simply require a GitHub login to access it. The graphical programming environment allows you drag in and connect nodes, view the function output, and debug if needed. There are other useful details such as built-in virtualisations that allow you to view your data as graphs, lists etc, and application manifests which include any resources your app needs and different levels of functionality to correspond with existing devices. Current applications include Hue lights, a mobile sensing driver and Twitter.

environment variables: urls for containers to connect to, data source metadata in Hypercat format, url for data source store, CA root certificate for the container for use over https (and a private key if you want to host on https server)

We are inviting you to join us in the open-source community launch of the Databox project on Friday 24th of March at Darwin College, in co-operation with the OCaml Labs in Cambridge.

Databox, started in October 2016 with generous funding by EPSRC, envisions an open-source personal networked device, augmented by cloud-hosted services, that collates, curates, and mediates access to an individual’s personal data by verified and audited, locally-executable, third party applications and services. The Databox will form the heart of an individual’s personal data processing ecosystem, providing a platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner with authenticated services, including services that may be accessed while roaming outside the home environment. You can find out more about the project on http://www.databoxproject.uk/ and view the in-progress code at https://github.com/me-box/.

We will present the initial release of a working open source Databox platform, which can be run on any device capable of running Docker containers. We endeavour to provide support for ARM devices such as the Raspberry Pi 3 for this release. This initial release will have basic data collection support through mobile sensing libraries and selected APIs, will provide basic data flow policing and privacy policy enforcement, and will support installation and operation of simple personal data processing apps. At this event we want to introduce the Databox to you, and then we hope to engage with security & privacy enthusiasts, data visualisation & analytics fans, and potential app developers to begin building a community and ecosystem around the Databox. We’re open to contributions of all kinds, from improvements to core components, to helping you integrate your favourite IoT devices, to brainstorming what apps and devices you want to see the Databox support!

Last week was an eventful start for the Databox project, with a strong presence at Mozilla Festival 2016 followed by the official launch event at the IET, Savoy Place!

At MozFest we presented a Smart Kitchen demo with partners the BBC R&D Labs as part of the “A Tale of Two Cities: Dilemmas in Connected Spaces” session. In this we set up a number of smart utensils to work with a synced videos that guided participants in a bake-off competition. While the winning contestant found the interaction with the devices useful, some found it the smart utensils rather confusing — clearly plenty of scope of work to integrate IoT into future Smart Homes.

We also ran several hack-an-app sessions where participants were able to use our modified Node Red environment to build apps that processed IoT data streams. The level of engagement — some participants stayed for several hours on Sunday! — suggested that there’s plenty of scope for enabling users to build and publish their own apps. Perhaps this is what’s needed to release the IoT’s potential?

We also had our official launch event at the IET Savoy Place– a great venue 🙂 We hosted several community members, SMEs, industry partners, and NGO representatives — thanks to all for coming! — presenting a series of talks followed by demos of the prototype and the software SDK, and finally a panel session between the industry partners and advisory boards discussing the challenges and opportunities faced by the project. Some great feedback, and a chance for everyone to see what they’d missed over the weekend.

Here are a few pictures from the Mozilla Festival and the launch event. A great job by the team, and thanks to everyone who participated during MozFest and who came along to the launch event. Exciting times ahead!